Yongping Zhang is a tenure-track assistant professor (Doctoral supervisor) at the Department of Urban Development and Management, School of Public Affairs, Zhejiang University. His research interest is mainly in the domain of quantitative urban studies, covering the topics highly related to urban big data analysis, smart cities, digital urban governance, sustainable transport and GIS. He focuses on understanding various urban issues with a combination of new (advanced) quantitative methods and emerging (big) data sources.

He received his PhD degree in Advanced Spatial Analysis from University College London (UCL), the United Kingdom. Before this, he obtained three master degrees: one in European Spatial Planning and Environmental Policy from Cardiff University (the UK), one in Environment and Society Studies from Radboud University Nijmegen (the Netherlands), and one in Urban and Regional Planning from Peking University (China). He obtained his bachelor degree in Geographic Information System (GIS) from Wuhan University (China).